I was very busy with blogging all 33 days of the workbench build and never blogged about the build process for the plane till, saw till and plane shelves.

As I have said before I do not like tool cabinets, that must be opened to access tools. I wanted my planes, saw, screwdrivers hammers and a few other tools on the tool wall, so I could just reach for them.

In designing the piece I was concerned with the depth of the piece to the wall. Based on that I decided not to include the #8 plane. As part of the design I evaluated the planes that I really used. The result was a set of planes that did not include a Veritas #4, which I sold. I also decided that all of the miscellaneous planes could live on a set of shelves designed to accommodate these planes plus a few future purchases. The final design ended up about 9″ deep. I also had to make sure it would fit the height of the wall, 4 ft. Based on this requirement I dropped the bottom of the shelf unit below the bottom of the tool wall lower edge.

The build process included two new processes for me. First I made a full size mock up to test the spacing and actual angle. Second was a full size drawing. Both of these concepts proved extremely valuable. Several design mistakes were found and corrected before actual rework was required.

The entire build process is documented in the commentary on each picture.